New PETA Investigation Prompts Call for Hong Kong’s Fashion InStyle to Ban Snakes’ Skins

New PETA Investigation Prompts Call for Hong Kong’s Fashion InStyle to Ban Snakes’ Skins

Hong Kong — Charming, elegant, and smart—those are the characteristics traditionally associated with snakes, and they’re just part of the reason PETA is calling on Fashion InStyle, Hong Kong’s leading fashion event, to ban their skins from its shows. Ahead of the Year of the Snake, PETA has just released new footage revealing that at slaughterhouses, snakes were beaten, beheaded, impaled, and inflated, and were likely still conscious as their skin was torn from their bodies. In response to this new footage, PETA has sent a letter to Fashion InStyle organisers, urging them to make the event snakeskin–free, pointing out that compassionate designers and consumers around the globe—including those at London Fashion Week—are rejecting products made from reptiles’ skins.

Credit: PETA Asia

“Snakes feel pain and fear and don’t want to be bashed over the head or sliced to pieces for a bag or a pair of boots,” says PETA Senior Vice President Jason Baker. “PETA’s new video should be a wakeup call for Fashion InStyle to celebrate the Year of the Snake by ditching reptiles’ skins and allowing only beautiful, luxurious vegan materials on its stage.”

Snake mothers are fiercely protective of their eggs, and some species care for their babies for weeks after they hatch and even “babysit” other mothers’ hatchlings. Many snakes are social, living in large communities where they make friends and form cliques. PETA investigations into snake farms and slaughterhouses in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand reveal that snakes killed for their skins are often housed in cramped, filthy boxes and may be bludgeoned with hammers, impaled, inflated with water, and skinned while they’re still conscious.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETAAsia.com or follow PETA Asia on X, Facebook, or Instagram.

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